HEADSUP: gzip packages on FreeBSD 4-STABLE

[Bruce A. Mah]

(Second try, after twelve hours of waiting for this post to show up.)

Due to some difficulties encountered while testing bzip2 packages for
FreeBSD 4.7-RC1, the Release Engineering team (with agreement from the
Port Manager team) has decided to revert back to gzip packages, at
least for the remaining 4.7-RC snapshots and 4.7-RELEASE.

As a side effect, this will once again allow older FreeBSD installations
to read recently-generated packages, although the use of such packages
is not officially supported.

Three things will happen, over the next few days, roughly in this order:

1. A bsd.port.mk change to make building gzip packages once again the
default on 4-STABLE.

2. Partial back-out of changes to pkg_* on 4-STABLE to make gzip the
default compression scheme for package creation and installation.

3. Upload of a gzip package set for 4-STABLE to the FTP servers,
which will most likely also be the package set for 4.7-RC2 (at
least for i386).

In the middle of this transition, there may be a few mismatches
between what compression formats are provided and expected by
different parts of the package system, thus, this heads-up notice.
We'll do our best to keep you-all informed on progress. Apologies for
any inconvenience this (un)change causes.

Bruce.
(For the RE team)